Silver DIY Interconnects

Sean is absolutely right about purity of silver. Since we're not talking about over 100 feet interconnect, there is no real difference between the 99.9% fine silver from jewelry store vs the medical grade 99.999%. I have many different brands of top of line silver cables out there and they claimed that it's 99.999 and 99.99 percent and I don't hear much difference in terms of silver sonic character. The real difference is geometry, thickness, connectors and build quality. Like sean said, play around with different gauge for both ground and signal.

Sean - I have heard the difference between "fine silver" and 99.99% and it is noticable to me in my system. If your system is not as resolving, you might not notice. Crump tells me that he has 6-nines silver and it is even better...

Audioengr, I would probably agree with you if I'm a cable manufacture who can affort high tech cable making equipment. For DIYs, I don't think there is much difference if one choose to use 3N or 6N. For 30 Ga solid core wire, assume 3N silver cost $0.10 a foot, 4N silver is around $0.80 a foot, and 5N silver is around $1.25 a foot and the 6N silver would cost about $4.00 a foot.
For 40 times the cost for DIY folks, I don't think they can really appreciate the difference of that 0.0998% purity. They might just break the hard to handle 6N cable due to its softness.

Sean, perhaps this is what you were referring to in your two camps discussion above, but at what point does capacitance become a problem? George Cardas states on his website “…Ray Kimber, Bill Low, Rodger Skoff, and myself…common use of multiple parallel conductors…if you measure the capacitance of each of our cables, they are all about the same, 45 pico farads per foot more or less.” I believe the capacitance of Goertz is even higher. Comparing this with Venhaus’s assertion that his IC is 3.5 pf/foot, it appears that maybe there’s some room to work with before problems occur? (I’m a chemist, not an engineer, so I’m a bit weak on electrical theory. Maybe the difference between 3.5 and 45 pf is not significant?)

The Cardas site goes onto say “Capacitance by itself means little unless viewed in the light of conductor inductance and resistance.” Unfortunately, I don’t have a way to measure these parameters on my DIY trials; so I have to rely on what it sounds like to me in my system.

Someday, I’ll have to get some Belden cable and try Risch’s design. I’ll have to get over my phobia regarding stranded cables first. In the meantime, the idea combining different gauge solid cores sounds intriguing…

I have tried to build DIY cables with mixed results. I did like the challenge. Fact is that the cable mfgs have the edge because of custom fabrication. In many cases you cannot duplicate the best cables because of specialized designs (patents), custom dielectrics, custom cable cores, 6-7 nines hot die wire, special windings, cryo, etc.